What NPRs All Things Considered wont Tell you about the Iran Nuclear
Issue (Like that Iran is Weak and has no Nukes while Israel is advanced and
Does)
JOHN HICKMAN
06/15/2021
Mt. Berry, Ga. (Special to Informed Comment) What news audiences of
National Public Radio (NPR)s All Things Considered have and have not heard
about the Iranian nuclear program since the election of Joe Biden offers a
neat boundary delineation of the Hallin spheres of mainstream reporting on
the topic. Daniel Hallins classic study of American news coverage of the
War in Vietnam[1] identified three concentric spheres of discourse.
Information and assumptions deemed to be beyond dispute lie in the consensus
sphere; those about which disagreement may be reported lie in the sphere of
legitimate controversy; and those beyond the bounds of acceptable expression
lie in the sphere of deviance. What All Things Considered reports matters
because its listeners are generally better educated and more liberal than
other broadcast news audiences. They are the demographic in Bidens
electoral base most attentive to foreign policy. Program content tends to
legitimate and thus lock in the range of acceptable policy choices for
decision makers.
The most frequently repeated element in the consensus sphere is that
negotiations between Washington and Tehran to revive or resurrect the
Iran nuclear deal or 2015 nuclear deal, informal phrases that replace
the formal sounding JCPOA, is an important part of Bidens foreign policy
agenda. Another undisputed element is the assumption that Irans advanced
missile program or ballistic missile program together with its support
for militant groups is a threat to the region. Nevertheless, Iranian
nuclear weapons are assumed to pose an existential threat to Israel, as is
Israeli responsibility for sabotage and assassination operations against the
Iranian nuclear program. Also, in an April 9, 2021 broadcast, NPR White
House correspondent Franco Ordoñez allowed an assertion by Michael Singh, a
Middle East adviser in the Georgia W. Bush administration, that Iranian
nuclear weapons are a serious threat to the United States to pass
unchallenged. (Iran has no nuclear weapons or even a program to make them,
simply a civilian nuclear enrichment program to make fuel for reactors for
electricity generation.)
The sphere of legitimate controversy is narrow, largely confined to the
question whether the JCPOA will prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear weapons
state or would simply kick the can down the road until it does. Framed in
part as a partisan disagreement between Democrats and Republicans, the news
story is reduced to whether Washington should extract additional concessions
from a vulnerable Tehran for rolling back economic sanctions.
That the Iranian nuclear weapons program might be a rational policy response
to the Israeli nuclear arsenal, understandable as nuclear deterrence, is
relegated to the sphere of deviance. Indeed, comparisons drawn to any case
of nuclear proliferation other than North Korea appears discursively
verboten. The tabooed context is that deterring dangerous rivals has been
crucial to decisions to acquire nuclear weapons historically. The Soviet
Union acquired nuclear weapons because the United States had them. India
acquired them because them the Peoples Republic of China had them. Pakistan
acquired them because India had them. Possessing nuclear weapons did not
always prevent war between these dyads but it appears to have prevented
nuclear war and also gave nuclear weapons states powerful incentives to
prevent conventional conflicts from escalating. Iran almost certainly wants
nuclear weapons to deter nuclear and conventional attack from its
nuclear-armed rival Israel (unlike Iran, Israel actually has really-existing
atom bombs, over 100 of them, similar to Indias arsenal).
There are other reasons for countries to go nuclear. Apartheid era South
Africa acquired a nuclear arsenal of a half dozen warheads to intimidate
neighboring states in a region where it was isolated. Israels nuclear
arsenal appears to have been constructed for the same reasons. The good news
is that South Africas nukes were disassembled with the change to a majority
rule in the early 1990s.
The precise boundary between the spheres of legitimate controversy and
deviance for this news story is identifiable in the only recent All Things
Considered broadcast acknowledging the existence of Israels nuclear
arsenal, an April 12, 2021 interview by NPR anchor Mary Louise Kelly with
the Carnegie Endowment for International Peaces Karim Sadjadpour. The
interviewee said the following:
[I]f you look at this through a geographic lens, Iran is goliath and Israel
is David. Iran is 75 times larger than Israel. If you look at this through a
military lens, Israel is Goliath, and Iran is David. Israel has over 100
nuclear weapons. Iran has none. So both countries see themselves as kind of
the victim fighting injustice. And you know that old expression, all is fair
in love and war.
Sadjadpour can be forgiven his Biblical metaphor to describe dueling victim
ideologies, though not his assertion of comparable military power. Yes, Iran
has 75 times the area of Israel but that is a silly metric. The two
countries dont share a land border. What is relevant is that only Iran is
vulnerable to nuclear bombardment. Israels minimum estimate of 110 nuclear
warheads, 80 deployed as ballistic missiles and 30 as gravity bombs[2] are
enough firepower to destroy Irans 18 cities with populations of 500,000 or
more together with its 26 major military bases, and still have plenty
remaining to continue intimidating neighboring Arab countries.
Sadjadpour continued by evoking the perspective of Israelis but not of
Iranians: For the Israelis, they say theyre not going to outsource our
security to any other country. Iran poses a threat to us, and we need to
counter them. Ignoring that invitation to listeners to perceive the
conflict solely from the Israeli vantage, Kelly then shifted attention back
to the consensus sphere item that negotiations will probably resume. This
was not an inspiring example of journalism.
If the editors and reporters at All Things Considered want their listeners
to understand this news story, they should describe nuclear deterrence as a
rational motivation for the Iranian nuclear program and report rather than
adopt the national security perspectives of both Israeli and Iranian
decision makers. More generally they should cover events in the Middle East
using language that leaves no doubt that the lives of Iranians and citizens
of majority Arab countries are just as valuable as those of Israelis.